UXLx: User Experience Lisbon

Speaker: Derek FeatherstoneResponsive Web Design is just one of the tools we use to create better designs. In this session, we'll explore what "better" design is, and apply that in new ways as we craft interactions between people and web sites and applications.In this talk, Derek looks at content, context and design, bringing them together in ways that show us what we can do to create truly responsive sites that meet the needs of the people using them, when they're using them, and how they're using them. When we're thinking beyond the device, we need to start with the device, of course, but then refine our designs to take into account the device's form factor, capabilities and features.After this session, you'll see why these examples and concepts had one of the world's leading design teams nodding their heads frantically as they looked to apply these principles to their own work.

Speaker: Joshua PorterThe difference between a happy user and a confused one is small…many times our success using software hinges on the smallest of interactions. In this talk Joshua Porter will discuss microcopy, or the tiny bits of copy that helps users in times of need. Examples include reminding people to use the right email address, informing them that their credit card is not needed, or that they don't have to create an account to continue. In many ways an interface is made up of many of these bits of copy…here's how to write it well and make users confident they're on the right track.

Speaker: Steve PortigalSome of the most effective ways of understanding what customers want or need – going out and talking to them – are surprisingly indirect. Insights produced by these methods impact two facets of innovation: first as information that informs the development of new products and services, and second as catalysts for internal change. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers) can drive design and innovation.

Presenting UXLx 2013

Speaker: Peter MorvillePeter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb, one of the most popular visuals in our discipline, encourages us to go beyond usability by creating products and services that are also useful, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.Now, for the first time, Peter explains why we must go further by creating "architectures of understanding" -- and why designing for insight and inspiration is in the best interests of our firms, our users, and ourselves.

Speaker: Don Norman Complexity is not only good, it is essential. Our lives are complex as are the activities we do. Our tools must match the activities. People think they want simplicity, but they are wrong, as evidenced by the fact that when offered the choice between a very simple product and one with more features, they opt for the feature-laden one. We don't want simplicity: we want understanding. Complex things can be made understandable: that is the role of good design. One solution is modularity, which is why we have so many different kitchen utensils. Which is why owing a portable computer, a desktop computer, a smart phone, and a pad computer -- all of them -- makes sense for some people. Each is used for a different reason, in a different setting for different purposes. Managing complexity is a partnership. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Speaker: Christopher Fahey Clay Shirky coined the phrase "cognitive surplus" to describe humanity's untapped mental energy, energy being put to spectacular and beneficial use in collaborate efforts like Wikipedia. User experience designers are rapidly learning how to tap into this surplus through social and psychological insights into human behavior, inviting users to channel their intellectual energies into technologically-mediated interactions that people find emotionally rewarding and deeply compelling. But where is the line between compelling interaction and compulsive behavior? With so much enthusiasm about "gamification", game mechanics, and behavior change, and with millions of people tagging other people's content and checking in every time they move around, designers of interactive systems should be asking themselves: what kinds of compelling and powerful interactive experiences actually enrich our lives... and what experiences simply drain our time and energy while providing nothing of value in return? How can we be sure we are using these psychologically engaging new interaction design patterns to make people's lives better? We'll look at some real-world "anti-patterns" of interaction design, where human behavior is, to put it bluntly, being exploited. But we'll also look at how well-intentioned interactions might inadvertently dehumanize users by failing to address their deeper personal needs. Finally, we'll try to define some guiding principles around how to create engrossing, even addictive products and experiences that nonetheless empower and enrich the people who use them.

Speaker: Josh Clark Get ready to rumble with this mobile battle royale: native app vs mobile web. Your referee Josh Clark pits the polish of native apps versus the accessibility of the web to help you choose the right platform for your app and audience. It's a decision that hinges not only on tech specs or audience reach, but also on subtle cultural differences, user needs, and audience personalities. (Hold onto your seats, folks, the winner of this prize fight may surprise you.)

Speaker: Kristina Halvorson The way we talk about our content has significant impact on the way we treat it within our organizations… and, therefore, the quality of the content we produce. How can we make the shift from treating content as a commodity to valuing it as a business asset? With a little storytelling and the help of a few powerful metaphors, you can begin to turn the tides.

Speaker: Stephen Anderson Love creative problem solving, but need something more practical— something specific to User Experience? Stephen P. Anderson will share with you the exercises he uses to solve the REAL problems. You'll flex your critical thinking muscle through a series of jump starter activities. Even better, attendees may be encouraged to participate, if not embarrass themselves in front of a room full of their peers as they challenge themselves to see past the first, obvious—and often incorrect—answers, and start to flip problems on their heads to see solutions from a different view.

Speaker: Nick Finck No matter how many departments your organization has, to your customers, it's all the same business. They expect a cohesive experience across all touch-points with your company, regardless of whether it's related to advertising, customer service, social presence, or the actual product or service you provide. The satisfaction of your customers, and thereby the success of your organization, depends in no small part on your ability to create a cohesive and consistently high-quality cross-channel experience. Some examples of disjointed cross-channel experiences are: - The customer has to inform the customer service representative of what the website says about their own return policy. - The specifications of a product online does not match the actual product a customer goes to pick up in the retail store. - The experience of the mobile application is far superior to the experience of the standard web application or software application. - The customer has to make three different phone calls to get their account changed because the information is stored in three separate business units. Applying consideration for the cross-channel experience is much easier said than done. It requires a significant level of coordination and collaboration between the stakeholders, to understand not just how to optimize their particular part of the service, but to maintain that optimal and consistent experience throughout. For example, the customer service department can do a great job of correcting a problem after the fact, but they can add greater value to the product or service as a whole by collaborating with sales and product teams to prevent the issue from arising in the first place. In this presentation, you will gain a better understanding of the different ways your customers might interact with your business. We will show how you can map out these touchpoints and help drive the creation of a cohesive experience across the various channels. We will show you how to navigate the political waters within your business to implement a true cross-channel design, which will build great experiences for your customers, regardless of how they are engaging with your business.

Speaker: Christian Crumlish These days everybody talks about game mechanics, badges, points, and leaderboards, but less attention is paid to the role of play in digital experiences. After childhood, play rarely "just happens," but you can design for it. Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how our designs can foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time. In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules, the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences. Children gravitate toward play-acting naturally but over time those skills can be lost. Giving people contexts in which they can explore alternate identities, wear masks, co-create stories, re-enact important events, or make snowmen and sandcastles can summon up that inner never-fully-lost capacity to enter a flow state. Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That's a stretch, but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer some form of gather, arranging, and displaying objects. Just so, even an HR portal may offer some opportunity to incorporate a collecting "game" into the workflow. Christian will share techniques for introducing a sense of play into the experiences we're designing and will exhort the assembled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.

Speaker: Louis Rosenfeld As user research becomes firmly established in organizations around the world, it's tempting to congratulate ourselves and retreat to our shiny new labs. But our work is nowhere near complete. As currently practiced, user research remains narrow in focus, often limited to the qualitative methods that reflect our own educational biases, and the tools that fit within our own comfort zones. Other research practices, such as web analytics, business analytics, and market research, are equally powerful ways of learning about users' wants and needs. More importantly, they're often complementary with what we do. When our organizations combine methods that tell what is going on are combined with methods that tell why, only then will they truly realize the value of all user research. In his keynote, Lou Rosenfeld will explore the complementary aspects of the different research perspectives, argue for breaking down the silos that divide them, and suggest a framework for developing products and services that are better analyzed, better designed, and, ultimately, better performing.

UXLx Video Pass gives you access to the videos from all the keynotes that took place on May 13 2011. You'll get to watch more than 6 hours of videos with 9 indudstry-leading speakers: Louis Rosenfeld, Christian Crumlish, Nick Finck, Stephen Anderson, Kristina Halvorson, Josh Clark, Christopher Fahey, Dario Buzzini and Don Norman. The videos were filmed with a multi-camera setup and have integrated slides. Get your video pass now at: http://www.ux-lx.com/registration.html Animations: ActiveMedia Registration System: CoreFactor Editing: Raio Filmes (Mário Lopes) Music: M-Pex (Marco Miranda)

Advantages of Doing The Least You Can Do™ Speaker: Steve Krug You’ve done your usability testing, you've gotten your results: now what? Two years ago, Steve gave a talk about the benefits of doing the as little as possible when fixing usability problems you discover in your designs. Now--after struggling for months to write about this topic in his new book-- he finally knows what he wanted to say.